My Favorite Days

I recently asked myself the question; what were my favorite days of my life? Before such a question can be answered, if it can be answered at all, there are some things that need clarification. For the sake of simplicity I am going to proclaim my "favorite days" as being the days I enjoyed the most rather than, say, days I might deem important. So, out of the running would be the day of my birth, for example. Also, one of the ingredients to be excluded is sex. Okay, there is my criteria.

After giving the question several hours of thought and reflection, I'm going to select two days.

July 4th 1963. The morning of that 4th of July the 12 year-old kid I once was laced on his Red Ball Jets and bicycled down to the local city park where there were games of physical skill where success was worth a silver dollar. One of the games consisted of throwing a baseball into a six inch pipe from about twenty feet. Over the course of an hour I lost my amateur athletic status, replacing it with three shiny silver dollars.

That afternoon some neighborhood pals and I blew up several plastic model cars with firecrackers, our voices deftly mimicking the cries of pain and terror from the imagined, ill-fated occupants. That was followed a few hours later by a dinner of hamburgers cooked out on a charcoal grill, with corn on the cob also on the plate. There was a big glass of pink lemonade to wash it all down. The day was capped by the front row viewing of the evening's fireworks display.

An hour or so later I wearily climbed into bed with several mosquito bites speckling my arms and legs, three silver dollars sitting on my dresser, and a grin stretched across my face. What a day.

August 18, 1987. A lifelong Ohioan, it was my fourth day ever in the state of California, the first three days encompassing the previous 72 hours. It was my first few days west of the Mississippi since a family vacation 25 years earlier. My girlfriend, Diana, who was to become my lifelong partner, and I were staying in the tiny town of Lee Vining, California, twenty miles east of Yosemite National Park. On the morning of August 18th, with the forecast calling for clear skies, we decided to drive up the long, winding, uphill highway to the eastern edge of Yosemite where we would hike the Tioga Pass Trail.

A view from the old mining cabin with the lakes
 below and the Sierra Nevada Mountains in the distance

At about noon we reached the parking lot just inside the boundary line of the park. We strapped on the small backpacks containing our water, lunches, and a small camp stove, and then started up the trail. The temperature was a wonderfully crisp 60, and the deep blue sky did not own a cloud. The trail began at 10,000 feet elevation and for the first few hundred feet it cruelly went up, but once we passed over the ridge, the alpine terrain leveled out. Before us sparkled two small, crystal lakes, and stunning greenish-brown meadows edged by the the rocky faces of Sierra cliffs. We had it all to ourselves, there wasn't a soul in sight.

We hiked alongside the lakes for a mile or so until we reached the remnants of an old mining cabin which needed photographing. We then meandered up to a snowy glacier to make an August snowball. About a half hour on down the trail we stopped for lunch at an overlook where we could gaze down onto the lakes. I cooked us some soup and tea and we sat back and relaxed in the utter quiet, the sunshine supplying a marvelously soothing warmth.

That evening, back in Lee Vining, Diana and I shared a pepperoni pizza and a carafe of wine on the veranda of our motel room as we watched the sun slowly slide below the horizon.

In the years to follow, Diana and I have returned to the Tioga Pass Trail on a handful of occasions, attempting to recreate that first hike best we could. It will always be a great place to hike, but there was something kind of magical about that day of August 18, 1987.